“I don’t think it was very unusual, probably the dime-store variety, but I want the exact same thing.” He paused, before going on to explain, “She lost it…the day my wife died.”

Whitney slowly lifted her eyes, pinning him. She tried to detect his grief, but only saw carefully veiled shadows in his faintly lined face. “I’m so sorry, Logan…about your wife. I should have offered my condolences first, before we started talking. The moment you walked in the door, I should have said…”

He held up a hand, stopping her. “No, that’s okay. Two more months and it’ll be a year. I’m getting used to it. No one could have predicted an aneurysm, not in someone that young…It was a shock, but…I don’t talk about it much.”

“Still…I should have sent a card.”

An uncomfortable second of silence slipped away.

“Why didn’t you?” he asked bluntly after a moment.

“I—I didn’t know if you’d want to hear from me,” she said honestly.

He stared at her, as if measuring his response before uttering it. “Whitney. Forget it. The thing with your husband has been over with for a long time.”

“My ex-husband,” she said quietly.

The wallet he held dropped a fraction of an inch. “Oh? I always wondered. I just didn’t think it would be good to—you know…” He didn’t say it, but she knew. It wouldn’t be a good idea to fraternize in any way, shape, or form with the wife of a small town, small time crook. Especially after you threatened to press charges for dipping into the petty cash.

“I found out you weren’t the first employer he took advantage of. He worked at the grocery and filched steaks from the freezer. He worked at the gas station and helped himself to gas from the pumps.”

“If I could have avoided firing him, I would have, Whitney.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

She shrugged. “This is hard for me, Logan. You do me a favor by offering him a job, and then he repays you by letting a few twenties attach themselves to his fingers.”

“It was a long time ago, Whit,” he said brusquely. “We’d both be better off to put it in the past. In the whole scheme of things it really isn’t important.”

Right. One deplorable incident. Gone, but not entirely forgotten.

Whitney took a deep, cleansing breath, reminding herself that whatever followed between her and Logan was business, and business only. “So,” she said, “tell me about this bear.”

He pulled the photo back into their line of vision. “I thought maybe you might have something…in the store…”

Whitney shook her head. She should have studied the bear, but instead her gaze was drawn to the child. “I don’t think so. But we can look. I’ll flip over the Closed sign and, even if it takes all night, you can go through my inventory.”

That wheedled a small, sad smile from him. He slowly closed the wallet, as if considering her offer.

“She’s a darling little girl, Logan,” Whitney said carefully. “I had no idea you were a daddy.”

“Yeah. We got her when she was about three years old. So I honestly think of her as my daughter. I love her as if—as if—” Logan’s voice dried up, and he suddenly choked over the sentence he couldn’t bring himself to say.

As if she were your daughter, Whitney silently finished for him. She studied him, fascinated. For a devil-may-care personality, he had the kindest heart. Always had. “Logan?” she queried, summoning the courage to touch him, to lay her hand on his forearm. “What is it?”

Logan’s eyes closed, shutting her out of his pain. He twisted slightly at the waist, and her hand dropped away, as he put the wallet back into his pocket. “We were in the process of adopting her, but there was a lot of red tape. It took us a long time to find the biological parents and when we located them, the father agreed to relinquish his rights—but the mother kept changing her mind. Then, last year, the mother finally signed away her rights and the adoption was in the final stages. But then Jill died, leaving me as a single father, and now the agency is stalling. The caseworker says my company takes too much of my time, and that they feel it’s in Amanda’s best interest to be raised in a two-parent household. She told me last week they have a couple who inquired about adopting an older child, preferably a girl. She left me with the feeling that they could remove Amanda from the house. Maybe within the next few weeks.”

Whitney went limp all over. She knew what is was like to be jerked out of one home and dropped into another. Her mother had experimented with boyfriends, and communes, and middle-of-the-night flights from unpaid landlords and unfortunate affairs. “Oh, Logan, I’m so sorry. If there’s anything I can do….”

“You can. Help me get this bear for Amanda before they take her away. I don’t want her to think I’m abandoning her. Hell, I’d do anything to keep her.”

“Does she have any idea?”

Logan shook his head. “The social worker’s intimated things to her, suggested that maybe she would like another house, with a new mommy…”

Whitney groaned, the small of her back sinking against the counter. “No. Tell me she didn’t say that?”

“Yeah,” he said grimly. “She did. I suppose she meant well. But Amanda will be traumatized if they take her away. She’s too young to remember her life prior to living with us. We’re all she’s ever known.”

Whitney’s vision blurred. She vividly remembered a grocery sack full of clothes, a nonchalant goodbye and a pat on the head from her mother.

“Sure, as a single dad, I’ve had a few mishaps along the way,” he confided. “But I’ve learned from them. I’ve even learned how to make fifteen nutritious variations of canned spaghetti.”

“Nutritious canned spaghetti?” She couldn’t help it—she laughed.

He lifted an apologetic shoulder. “On the food chain, it’s one notch above tuna, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

Whitney had to bite her bottom lip. Her cheeks ached from trying not to smile. Her mother had never even cared enough to even open a can of tuna, let alone slap peanut butter on a slice of bread.

“Whitney, listen to me,” he said earnestly. “If I replace that bear, and Amanda’s taken away, it’ll give her a connection to something she loved. She needs to know that no matter what happens, I’m there for her. I love that kid so much—so damn much—that the thought of losing her, just….”

A hot, hard lump swelled in Whitney’s throat; she willed her response to be firm, not shaky. God knows, she’d do anything for Logan. All he had to do was ask. “I can tell you right now I don’t have anything like it in the store. But I’ll find it,” Whitney said. “I promise.”

“Can you believe this? Can you believe I’m looking for a teddy bear?” he asked humorlessly. “Sometimes I think it would just be easier to find myself a wife. Maybe that would make the caseworker happy.”

Whitney stared into the depths of his ice-blue eyes and the most unimaginable thought crossed her mind. She just couldn’t bring herself to say it. Suddenly she was paralyzed by the awesomeness of it all.

She vaguely considered offering herself up as the sacrificial lamb.

“Whitney?”

A second slipped away.

“Yes, Logan?”

“Thank you,” he said simply. “For you to do this, especially after everything that’s happened…well, it makes me realize I overlooked something very special in high school.”

The expression of gratitude took her breath away. His praise was so unexpected. As teenagers, they had shared a few laughs, the same row of seats in study hall, and, on Senior Skip Day, one near kiss…something that, in later years, she’d silently regretted as her “one near miss.” Later, when Logan offered her ex a job, and he’d so badly messed that up, she had apologized repeatedly, hoping to redeem herself in Logan’s eyes. But Logan had been young and angry, and he’d stalked away.

After years of beating herself up over that horrific parting it seemed inconceivable that all she had to do to make things better was find a teddy bear. It was a small price to pay to be able to put the matter to rest, and get the man and the memories out of her mind.